Abnormal Psychology

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Things That Sometimes Work If You Have Anxiety. Anxiety disorders are the most common class of psychiatric disorders.

Their US prevalence is about 20%. They’re also among the least recognized and least treated. We have sort of finally beaten into people’s thick skulls that depression isn’t just being sad, and you can’t just turn your frown upside down or something – but the most common response to anxiety disorders is still “Anxiety? So what, everyone gets that sometimes.” But it’s hard to describe how disabling anxiety can be.
Captives of the Mind. Illustration by Matt Dorfman He left more than a dozen lamps burning in his workroom. They shone upon the desk, and on the unfinished manuscript neatly stacked on top of it. Next to the manuscript was a two-page letter. This was the scene on the evening David Foster Wallace hanged himself.

Wallace’s 2008 suicide at the age of 46 devastated the literary community.

This bombshell comes just weeks before the publication of the fifth revision of the manual, called DSM-5. On 29 April, Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), advocated a major shift away from categorising diseases such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia according to a person's symptoms. Instead, Insel wants mental disorders to be diagnosed more objectively using genetics, brain scans that show abnormal patterns of activity and cognitive testing.
Mark Rubinstein: New Psychiatric Disorders and Their Social Side Effects. The American Psychiatric Association has just published the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition).

Added to the psychiatric disorders previously named (minus a few), the manual lists 15 new disorders ranging from caffeine withdrawal syndrome to restless legs syndrome along, with hoarding disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder.
Suicidal behaviour is a disease, psychiatrists argue - health - 17 May 2013. Read full article Continue reading page | 1 | 2 As suicide rates climb steeply in the US a growing number of psychiatrists are arguing that suicidal behaviour should be considered as a disease in its own right, rather than as a behaviour resulting from a mood disorder.

They base their argument on mounting evidence showing that the brains of people who have committed suicide have striking similarities, quite distinct from what is seen in the brains of people who have similar mood disorders but who died of natural causes. Suicide also tends to be more common in some families, suggesting there may be genetic and other biological factors in play. What's more, most people with mood disorders never attempt to kill themselves, and about 10 per cent of suicides have no history of mental disease.
America's Mental Health Industry Is a Threat to Our Sanity. Why do some of us become dissident mental health professionals?

The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally kills young children.
Suicide Now Kills More Americans Than Car Wrecks. Suicide has surpassed car accidents as the No. 1 cause of injury-related death in the United States, according to new research.

From 2000 to 2009, the death rate for suicide ticked up 15 percent while it decreased 25 percent for car wrecks, the study found. Improved traffic safety measures might be responsible for the decline in car-crash deaths. As such, the researchers said similar attention and resources are needed to prevent suicide and other injury-related mortality. Death by unintentional poisoning, which includes drug overdoses, came in third behind car wrecks and suicide after increasing 128 percent from 2000 to 2009.

The data from 2010 would push that rise in death rate even higher, to 136 percent, study researcher Ian Rockett told LiveScience in an email.
Veterans Make Up Shrinking Percentage of Suicides. The report, based on the most extensive data the department has ever collected on suicide, found that the number of suicides among veterans reached 22 a day in 2010, the most recent year available.

That was up by 22 percent from 2007, when the daily number was 18. But it is only 10 percent higher than in 1999, according to the report. Department officials described the numbers as “relatively stable” over the decade.
Therapy the way a man would do it.
This Is Anxiety - James Hamblin. "If you can't do something perfectly, why do it at all?

" Stories from Atlantic readers on how to think about anxiety, what is helpful, and what isn't.
Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
Michael’s problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born.

Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath - Judith Ohikuare. In 2005, James Fallon's life started to resemble the plot of a well-honed joke or big-screen thriller: A neuroscientist is working in his laboratory one day when he thinks he has stumbled upon a big mistake.

He is researching Alzheimer's and using his healthy family members' brain scans as a control, while simultaneously reviewing the fMRIs of murderous psychopaths for a side project. It appears, though, that one of the killers' scans has been shuffled into the wrong batch. The scans are anonymously labeled, so the researcher has a technician break the code to identify the individual in his family, and place his or her scan in its proper place.

Living in America will drive you insane — literally. This article originally appeared on Alternet. In “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” (New York Review of Books, 2011), Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discusses over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, pathologizing of normal behaviors, Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry, and the adverse effects of psychiatric medications. While diagnostic expansionism and Big Pharma certainly deserve a large share of the blame for this epidemic, there is another reason.